A brand new EN World in development

As some of those of you who follow me on Twitter may already know, we're in the planning stages of a brand new EN World. Now, before I say anything further, I'd like to clarify one important piece of information:

We will be importing the entire database, including all users, posts, threads, etc.

So, we're only in the planning stages right now. No actual work has been done yet, other than some playing around with some ideas on a test site. The core of the new site will be an upgrade from our venerable vBulletin 3.8 installation to the more recent vBulletin 4 forum software; however, as you know, EN World has a massive array of customizations and features that have been made to the core software over the past decade, and the majority of the work will involve replicating those features on the new site along with adding a few new features.

It's probably important to point out a vital piece of information at this point:

We will be importing the entire database, including all users, posts, threads, etc.

Changes you can expect to see include a much more modern and easy-to use news page, and a generally cleaner - but more powerful - interface.

A large part of the new site will involve me resurrecting our old Campaign Manager code. We have started and restarted development on this perhaps four or five times over the last decade (and during that time other sites have arrived and grown which do specifically that) but we never got it as far as launch. Some of you might recall prototypes I've shown occasionally. This time we're going to actually do it - maybe 8 years later than I planned, but them's the breaks. I'm not actually going to use the original code; I'm going to be tasking the core software's groups functionality to do the job.

As I mentioned above, we're still at the planning stages. It is quite some way off yet, and not all decisions have been made. Although we did decide one thing:

We will be importing the entire database, including all users, posts, threads, etc.

The primary benefit of this project is to start over with a clean, bug-free installation of vBulletin. Our current platform has been hacked, modded, and customized so many times over the last then years that the code barely resembles the original, and the whole system is very cluttered and inefficient. It's quite a mess, to be honest, and this will give us a solid core base to operate from for the next ten years. Plus it'll do some funky stuff.

Anyway. Now you know! Like I said, it's not imminent (and we don't yet have any kind of ETA), but it is in the works, and it is going to be a big change. Oh but:

We will be importing the entire database, including all users, posts, threads, etc.

Oh, and we'll also be able to safely resurrect the blogs which died in hacker/spambot induced flames a couple of months ago.